There are over 10 million persons with locomotion disorders in worldwide, caused by various life changing incidents such as stroke, spinal cord injury, war injuries or other diseases. As a result of loss of the physical mobility, the affected person cannot carry out his desired or even day to day activities with full participation or in worse cases resulting in complete loss of mobility. Further the affected persons are prone to suffer from severe emotional trauma and depression as a result of their condition.
Various assistive devices have been developed over last decade for assisting the persons suffering from the mobility disorders with an objective to help the disabled person to regain the ability to stand and walk, and also minimize the requirement of intensive therapist dependent training. One category of assistive devices that help in rehabilitation is exoskeleton in nature. A powered exoskeleton device is a wearable mobile machine that is powered by a system of electric motors or pneumatics or levers, or hydraulics, or a combination of technologies that allow for limb movement with increased strength and endurance. However, these devices have major drawbacks and are limiting their use as both therapeutic as well as a mobility device. The drawbacks include, large ‘filtering out’ of needy patients due to lack of safety, and lack of their ability to handle the system. Critical ‘Early Intervention’ time is lost until patients become eligible for therapy, their ability to improve from therapy significantly reduces. lack of guaranteed fall safety, challenges in donning and doffing, slow speed, limited range, difficulty in transferring, rough movement, high dependency on the operating therapist, unequal pressure distribution, potential skin issues due to the hardness of the materials used and the high costs.
Further the patient/individual/user face the risk of falling and also the heavy exoskeleton device makes it inconvenient to use. In addition, the tedious manual effort is needed to support/strap patient into the exoskeleton for rehabilitation.
In view of the foregoing, there is a need for a robotic exoskeleton assisted rehabilitation system that is 100% fall safe, which enables early intervention, even while walking with the exoskeleton device, light in weight and easy to use and move around and most importantly cost effective as compared to the systems that are presently available.